New Axosoft Pricing, New Features, Branding Tweaks and Other Big Announcements

Today, we are announcing a number of very exciting changes to Axosoft and OnTime, so lets get right into them:

NEW V14.1 released – Tons of new features. Check out our “What’s New” page here.

Axosoft and OnTime branding changes – We are dropping the “OnTime” name from our hosted product, but keeping it for our installed customers. Read more below.

New pricing for Axosoft Scrum, Bug Tracker and Premium Support – Lots of exciting changes to pricing that you can read about below.

Axosoft and OnTime Branding Changes

Since Axosoft was founded in 2002, customers often referred to the OnTime product line as “Axosoft.” Axosoft has become synonymous with providing best-of-breed Scrum, Bug Tracking, HelpDesk and Wiki tools for software developers, so when we separated the Axosoft OnTime product onto its own domain two years ago, OnTimeNow.com, the change didn’t make sense to a lot of our customers. Quite frankly we were slow to realize this ourselves. Two years later, we’ve come to the same conclusion: The “OnTime” portion of the product name is largely unnecessary, especially in the new cloud-centric world.

Now, rather than “Axosoft OnTime Scrum” or “Axosoft OnTime Bug Tracker”, the new names of our products are just “Axosoft Scrum” and “Axosoft Bug Tracker.” The entire set of products is just the Axosoft Product Suite.

This name change makes it easier to just say “we use Axosoft” when you refer to our dev tools. As a result of dropping the OnTime name, it also made sense to bring everything back under the Axosoft.com domain. So while your instance of Axosoft Hosted products will continue to work under [AccountName].OnTimeNow.com, they will also work under [AccountName].Axosoft.com. The Axosoft.com version is preferred as we expect to phase out the old name at some point in the future.

Keeping the OnTime Name for Installed Customers

For our installed customers, we’ve decided to keep the OnTime name. This makes it easier to find your downloads, manage the OnTime Services on your servers, and any other dependencies you have built in your installed system that depends on the OnTime naming convention.

New Pricing Changes

Lets start with a quick price matrix of the products that are affected by the pricing changes:

The Axosoft Help Desk and Wiki products will maintain the same $7 per user per month pricing they had before.

Of course, the most exciting pricing announcement is that we are making the Axosoft Bug Tracker just $1 per year (or free with any other product) for teams of any size. This is an unprecedented move by any developer tools vendor. Never before has a full-featured bug tracking product been made available as a hosted solution to software development teams for practically free. This is big. Imagine every software development team around the world having access to a high quality, feature-rich product for tracking their bugs and working together as a team. We fully expect that Axosoft Bug Tracker will become the de facto standard bug tracker for dev teams worldwide.

So why are we doing this?

The why is easy. We love software and we want software developers to be able to create even better software. Tracking bugs is a fundamental requirement to creating great software products.

You might be asking yourself, “what’s the catch?” or “how can you afford to do this?” The answer to that is scale. We now have over 10,000 paying customers for our highly popular Axosoft Scrum software (as well as Axosoft HelpDesk and Wiki). This is a great way for us to give back to the community. Plus, something tells us that giving more development teams exposure to the Axosoft Product Suite through Axosoft’s near-free Bug Tracker will probably make our products even more popular than they already are. So while we do expect to benefit from the $1 Axosoft Bug Tracker, there truly is no catch for the customer. Buying Axosoft Bug Tracker for just $1 per year doesn’t put you on the hook for anything more!

What’s the deal with the $1? Why not free?

There are two reasons for this: 1) We don’t want to get a zillion junk accounts that will never be used. A little skin in the game, even when it’s just $1, goes a long way to ensure only interested parties apply. 2) Collecting even a nominal fee of $1 gives us the opportunity to support new software startups with a new $10,000 grant program. We love software companies and this grant program gives us an opportunity to support new software startups with both money and mentorship that they badly need to build new products.

No. If you have Axosoft Scrum at $7 per user, even though we are raising the price to $10 per user, your price will remain the same $7 per user that you have been paying. Also, if you only have Axosoft Bug Tracker and were paying $7 per user for it, we kept your price the same, but added Axosoft Scrum at the same rate because the $1 bug tracker no longer has burndown charts and other features that are specific to Scrum. By adding Axosoft Scrum and keeping your price the same as before, we make sure you don’t lose any features and your price is unaffected.

Can I change my configuration to downgrade to just the Bug Tracker for $1/year?

Yes, absolutely. Any existing customer can modify their account through the Tools Menu -> Account Administration.